Has anyone seen a preview of the creepy new sci-fi thriller "I am a Legend" due to hit theaters this December? If you go to youtube.com you can watch a preview of the film. The story revolves around the life of a single survivor, located in NYC five years from now, of a devestating manmade plague that has killed off most of the human population. I don't know the story ultra-well, but I did pick out an interesting indication from the preview that the director may be familiar with the Peak Oil theory (peak oil theory-- the idea that global oil production will reach a maximum and then decline).

If you look closely at the part of the preview where Robert Neville (played by Will Smith) is pumping gasoline at a filling station you will notice on the sign that the price for a gallon of regular gasoline is $6.63. Now, albeit, the movie is depicting a time 5 years in the future, but even with inflation a rise in gasoline prices to nearly seven dollars a gallon implies that the supply is not keeping pace with the demand. We are currently, as a thread in this section points out, facing $100 a barrel oil and the newspapers, the NYTimes included, are calling this the first demand led energy crisis. I doubt the Peak Oil theory plays any role in the the story's plot, although I cannot help but wonder if anyone else noticed this subtlety from the preview and, if so, wondered, like me, why the director chose to include this higher price for gasoline.

I think it's a perfectly logical thing for the director to do. It adds to the "a few years from now" setting and prevents the movie from seeming dated if gasoline goes higher than the price shown, which is quite possible due to failure of politics.

There is no mention of oil shortage in the original novel in written in the fifties. It does however describe how oil is transported in actual barrels on the backs of trucks. Which kind of dates it as we got rid of oil barrels a long time ago.

And why is there an "a" in the movie title? There was no "a" in the book title. They should take that "a" out of the movie title and give it to Neil Armstrong.

There isn't. That's a typo/mistake by the OP.

I don't know what the writers were trying to imply, but in the face of a disaster, that seems a very low price. Assuming the plague wasn't instantaneous, there would be a period with increasing numbers of people filling the hospitals, supply lines starting to break down, but society still holding on for a bit. Barring legal sanctions not to raise prices, they would rise very quickly and many people would be willing to pay a lot to get out of the city

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I really doubt they put that much thought into it. It was probably more a matter of "Hey, gas prices are going up, they'll probably be even higher in a few years."

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Hardly new. It's the third movie version of Richard Matheson's 1950s novel I am Legend. See The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price and The Omega Man with Charleton Heston.

Hollywood really has run out of ideas.

Fred

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White Zombie had a really cool song called "I am Legend"..
and the price of gas as depicted in the movie is just a subtle propaganda thing telling us that we gotta stop using the evil black goo from the deep to power our lives, or else we are screwed.
of course, every movie ever made that involves a plague/meteor impact/nuclear war that happens "in the near future" is meant as a warning that we have to change our evil ways, "or else"..

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Mark Dacascos and the DTV market has made sure it technically is the fourth adaptation.

As a bit of a B-Movie expert I can assure you, Will Smith's is more a THE OMEGA MAN in I AM LEGEND's clothing than they care to admit. Which(as a B-Movie fan) is just fine with me...someday there will be a properly intimate adaptation. Just not yet.

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Doubtful. Hollywood doesn't do "subtle". If that had been the message, it would have been a virus found in an oil well that turned everyone into zombies, and it would have been spread by infected gasoline pumps.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I am Omega. Oh, my, there's an original title. I feel like quoting Dorothy Parker here.

Fred

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"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684

...And the next remake will be called Omega Legend.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

hollywood does do "subtle".
after the movie comes out, see if you can count how many hybrid cars are in the movie.

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Again, they probably put little thought into it beyond extrapolating from a current trend.

EDIT: One that's especially popular in Southern California.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

From the premotional materials that I have seen, it is called I am Legend, not I am a Legend, and it's a Marsh-of-Camarina-type-story.

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Well, as the movie turns out, Dacascos isn't "alone" very long before a few other last people on Earth show up, making him not so Omega after all. Maybe more like The Upsilon Man.

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random youtube observation #83:
Nana Mouskouri without glasses is like peanut butter without jelly, like yin without yang, spic without span...

Maybe, but if they had been in Florida during hurricane Katrina it wouldn't have been much of a leap. Actually, prices in California went up quite a bit too - it's only this week that I've seen prices match what they were back then.

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

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